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Thriving Community

March 12, 2015 by Belghast

Oklahoma Conventions

Pax South was my first real gaming convention, and I have to say I had an absolute blast there. Don’t get me wrong I had been to a few conventions in the past, even worked a few comic book conventions when I worked at a comic book shop, but they were nothing like Pax. This got me thinking about what I might be missing out on here locally. It turns out we have a not insignificant number of conventions that happen within a short driving distance. In fact at the tail end of this month a pretty big retro gaming convention is happening in the Oklahoma City area. As you can see from the handy little button thing on the right it is happening March 28th and 29th at the Oklahoma Expo Hall of the Oklahoma State Fair Park in Oklahoma City… Oklahoma. Yeah that was a lot of Oklahoma in a row, even as a lifer I thought it was a bit excessive.

Super! Bitcon is going on its second year, and seems to be a pretty cool place to go especially if you are into “retro” gaming… or as I like to call it “my childhood”. They have several well known guests on the docket like Smooth McGroove, Alpha Omega Sin, and Patrick Scott Patterson. They also apparently have a fairly large exhibitor hall with several local and regional companies showing off the games they have been working on, as well as a free play arcade and gaming museum. There is this #IamSuperBitcon thing from social media where folks talk about their experiences last year that is really interesting to watch as well. The absolute best part of all of this is that you get a two day pass for only $10 and for this… I thought it would be a sin for me to pass up going. Oklahoma City is only an hour and a half drive for me from Tulsa, so not a big deal at all. One of my new goals this year is to try and hit up as many of these smaller conventions as I can to tide me over until the next Pax. As we get closer to time I will talk about the Heartland Gaming Expo and the XPO games convention both in the Tulsa area. It just excites me that we have this thriving games culture seemingly in my own back yard.

Thriving Community

One of the topics that I have been mulling over in my head is why exactly we have manages to stay happy and engaged with Final Fantasy XIV for the better part of this last year. So often we pop into a MMO and last a few months only to flit off to another title a month later. At the same time I have been examining why I stayed in World of Warcraft for over seven years, and continue to return to it. I think the answer to Final Fantasy XIV is two fold. Firstly we returned to the game after a sequence of boom bust cycles in MMOs like Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar. I was personally looking for a place to “settle down” for awhile, and Final Fantasy XIV had been the only title that all of my friends seemed to leave “on good terms” with. So we set down roots, and I started getting involved in the Cactuar community as did the rest of my guild. This process was aided by the fact that we had nothing on the horizon to draw our attention away from the game. As such we have been able to play the game without the distraction of shiny new objects and their promises of a better gaming experience.

I think this lull in MMO releases has helped a lot of games that were stable get more so. When I came back to Final Fantasy XIV last July they were at I believe 2.5 million subscribers, and last week they announced that they had blossomed up to 4 million subscribers. That is a fairly significant growth over what is essentially two quarters, and I think that in part it has a lot to do with the fact that there is really nothing out there to pull attention away from it. Don’t get me wrong Warlords of Draenor happened, and I have been playing it… but that is only a draw to players who still have warmth in their hearts for the World of Warcraft franchise. I think the answer to why we have stayed is that we were given enough time to set down roots. We not only have friends in our free company, but are members of several active linkshells that give us access to raiding and grouping beyond our own numbers. This sort of environment is contagious and has made recruiting more members to the fold exceptionally easy. All of which builds upon itself giving me the piece the kept me coming back to World of Warcraft all of this time… a stable and thriving community. The awesome thing is… I can have my cake and eat it two, because at this point my community in World of Warcraft is vastly different than my community blooming here in Final Fantasy XIV.

The Botanist

I had every intention to come home and have a quiet night of powering through the early levels of botany. In fact that is precisely how my evening started, with me brute forcing the level 10 trees near Bentbranch in the Central Shroud. Right now I am working towards the level 10 quest, which will require 99 Crow Feathers. My goal is to be able to have 99 waiting and ready for when I ding 10 and can immediately turn in that quest and move on to the next sequence. However last night it was only a matter of moments before someone in guild needed something… and the adventurer inside me leapt at the chance to do something “not crafting”. My friend Arkenor needed a run of Haukke Manor, and another group needed a run of Copperbell and thankfully we had the right mix of people to make both happen. I tanked Haukke on my Paladin and another run when smoothly. I have said this before, but I keep having to say it over and over. I love how damned easy and rewarding it is to run lower level content with your friends.

Once the crafting thing was tossed aside I spent most of the rest of the night running content. We moved from Haukke into a random Expert Roulette picking up Cav to add to Ash, myself and Thalen. Once finished there I ran a few trials roulette and a hard roulette… and before I realized it was 9:30 and I was starting to get a bit tired. This is the way an evening can evaporate in Eorzea, with a bunch of chain events that make you wonder where the time went. So sadly I did not make much progress on Botanist, but I am feeling that Sunday I will have another “catch up on television” day downstairs on my laptop and push forward again. At some point I need to run a good deal more content however because I would really like to cap my poetics this week, and I have barely put a dent in them. If I keep running a few roulettes each day, I should be able to do it without much difficulty. The only monkey wrench in this plan is the fact that most of Saturday I will be out of town, leaving me only Sunday to really work on such things. In any case… I had a fun evening with my Free Company and have zero regrets of not making any flower picking progress.

Serious Spelunking

March 11, 2015 by Belghast

Kromog Fell Down

Once more we entered the Blackrock Foundry, and once more we made some progress in our eventual goal of killing Blackhand. Generally speaking on Tuesday nights we try and clear all of our “farmed” content, some of which is less farmed than others. We struggled a bit at Oregorger this week, but managed to get him on what I think was our third attempt. That fight is just frustrating no matter how often you do it. I am not really sure what we were doing differently and if we were breaking boxes in the wrong order, but Oregorger was not going where we expected him to go. Eventually through a combination of luck and perseverance we managed to defeat him, and move on to more interesting fights. Quite honestly other than this rough spot, it was a pretty banner week given that we were down at least one healer the entire night.

Once again I got nothing of any use from the evening which is starting to get frustrating. This is two weeks now without a single upgrade, even after spending plenty of bonus roll tokens. My hope is that eventually there is going to be a week where everything I need drops all at once. It is just frustrating when you can feel the entire raid getting better geared… and you are still stuck at roughly the place you started Blackrock with. Our big accomplishment of the night is that we finally managed to defeat Kromog or Kologarn 2.0 as we tend to refer to him. On the attempt we managed to down him I think I was the only person dead, or at least one of the only. My issue was that I danced around with one of the tanks for a bit as we kept going for the same hand. All told though it was a pretty great night of raiding, and I look forward to making progress on Thogar on Thursday.

Serious Spelunking

While raiding is enjoyable and an important part of my week, it was far from the most important thing on my mind last night. Since I have a level 50 of every role, I have decided to deep headlong into the hole that is crafting in Final Fantasy XIV. Since I am making this my new mission I have decided to take it on in a rather methodical way, and that means focusing on leveling my Disciple of the Land “gathering” professions first to hopefully make feeding materials to the OTHER professions that much easier. If you have been reading my blog you have known that over the last few days I made a very serious push to finish leveling mining. Last night at the beginning of the evening I was what felt like a stones throw away from 50 sitting at 48 and some change. The problem is my evening did not work out exactly how I intended, and one thing or another kept sidetracking me. By raid time I had managed to push through to 49 but had to take a break to beat up orcs and such.

After the raid however I went back to pushing the gathering leves. The 45 leves in Coerthas send you all over that zone, or more importantly in three distinct areas. One of the tricks I figured out is the keep doing the one closest to the leve master, with a hopes of stacking all three of the ones that were further away at the same time… and then going out and completing those together. Each time you complete a leve it resets the ones the master offers. Essentially it took a few trips to the closest leve and one trip to the three furthest and I dinged 50. I have to give huge thanks to Thalen for hanging out and crafting me a full set of level 50 miner gear that I am wearing in the above picture. The best part… is that /visor turns off and on the headlamp. I have to say that a game is amazing if it can even make the crafting gear feel epic.

Lumberjack Time

I wasted no time sitting on my laurels, because I have so much more to level in order to reach my goal of being an “omni crafter”. This morning I started down the path of the botanist, which is essentially the guild of lumberjacks. I have to say though… after playing a Warrior for so long… that axe feels really puny. As of this morning I am sitting at level 5 and have completed the first quest. For this next stretch I am going to try and push through as long as I can stand it on just harvesting material alone, to hopefully allow my level quest allowance to regenerate a bit. Right now I only have 35 allowances, so it took most of the 99 maximum that I was sitting at to go from 30 to 50 mining. That is really my only frustration with this process, is that I don’t really understand why there is a leve allowance in the first place. There have to be better ways to farm gil than to grind leves over and over.

At least with leveling a battle profession, I can rely on dungeons and fates to replace the need for leves. But with crafting of all kinds it feels like you desperately need those to augment the experience you gain through harvesting. My hope is that once I start down the crafting path proper, I can use the Ixal dailies to make some serious headway. The goal right now is to stair step up each of the professions. So the first goal will be to take all of them to fifteen, then start raising them by 5 levels at a time. The hope is to make it so that when I need an item from one profession for the one I am currently working on… I can craft those without much fuss. This is a pretty significant undertaking, but I think I can accomplish it without burning out too badly. Honestly so far with the gathering professions I find them extremely relaxing. You end up hanging out, listening to the amazing music in this game, and clicking sparkly nodes. Compared to tanking… it is a piece of cake!

Turn 9 Progress

March 10, 2015 by Belghast

Mining Delays

Last night I had every intention to come right home from work and start mining like a boss. I made an oven pizza, fixed my plate and was all set to catch up on the last few episodes of Star Wars Rebels while mashing buttons to break rocks. However upon logging into the game I instantly had a group invite waiting from Tam, which generally means I am needed to go run something. Turns out last night I got drafted to tank a random expert roulette. Granted I had been capped on poetics for awhile at that point, seeing as I capped out sometime Saturday morning during the Pax East live stream. However I know my FC Mates were not quite there yet, and Ashgar needed a random expert for his alexandrite map. So I swapped back into my tanking gear and ran through Amdapor Keep Hard, which went pretty smoothly all things considered.

I kept trying to get back into mining last night but one thing or another kept sidetracking me. I started the evening at 44 and ended the evening at 47 which I guess isn’t too horrible all things considered, especially when I put in as little actual mining time as I did. This is why I tend to progress poorly through crafting content. If presented the option of smashing monsters in the face, I will always take that option. So over the course of the night I did an expert roulette, a random S Rank hunt, a treasure map… all to avoid going back to the mining grind. I will likely put in some effort on it this evening before my WoW raid, but I doubt I will hit 50 just yet. Hopefully at the least on Wednesday I can wrap that up and start work on the next profession.

Turn 9 Progress

Last night was my second night of work on Turn 9 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut, or more correctly the final turn of the Second Coil of Bahamut. I spent significantly less amount time derping it up this week, and we spent more time kicking ass and taking names. When we last played we were unable to get through the meteor phase reliably. We were attempting the “roulette” method of everyone bunching up and then the group running around the circle each time someone gets a meteor. This method requires the group to run together, and then stop at certain points until the next meteor spawns in. The person who just got the last meteor has to cut across the circle to catch up to the party again. For me at least it felt like pure chaos and while we managed to get through the phase once or twice doing this… it never felt like something that was terribly repeatable.

This week we threw the suggested rules out the window and actually started to pull together that phase of the fight. Instead of grouping up, we all spread out along the outer ring of the room. As a meteor would drop, that player would run to another person and group up, essentially slowly dropping the rocks around the outside of the room equally spaced. It probably seems a lot more chaotic to watch, but for us it felt far more controlled as it gave time for folks to get off a few heals during this phase. Towards the end of the night we were able to consistently nail the meteor phase and get into phase three proper. Now we need to learn this phase, because right now without really knowing the pattern fully… it feels insane. My hope is if we can keep learning a phase a week we will down it shortly. I am really enjoying turn nine, because it feels awesome when we a nail super difficult phase.

Playing Big Kid

We performed admirably in turn nine considering that for the most part our entire raid felt out of it for one reason or another. In fact due to the daylight savings time crap, we considered even maybe trying something a bit easier. However once the heat of battle started, we managed to wake up and pull things together. However those first few pulls were rather questionable. After getting out of the dungeon I returned to mining for a bit, and had just finished a level when my friend Cuppy logged in. A few weeks back I had to halt an intended run of Sastasha because it was going to cut into raid time, and felt pretty horrible for having to do it. It turns out she pugged it and was now ready for Tam Tara Deepcroft, so no matter what my plans were I was totally down with running it with her. So I put on my Paladin outfit, and like always we had a number of volunteers ready to help out.

The final mix ended up being Cuppy on her Arcanist, me on my Paladin, Thalen on his White Mage, and Kodra barding it up. Like most low level dungeons it went extremely smoothly, but we took our time making sure to kill every last monster in the place for the maximum amount of experience. The only time I seem to find myself playing a paladin is when doing older content, because it seems significantly easier to tank with a paladin. Namely I find myself constantly teetering on the edge of not having any TP when I am playing my Warrior, whereas on the paladin I can just keep flashing and power through the place. If in an absolute worse case scenario I run out of MP, I could always resort to riot blade. Sadly however nothing of use dropped for Cuppy, so I have a feeling we will be running that place some more. The Acolyte’s set is amazing, and will hold a player until they are somewhere in their mid 20s. Doing piddly little dungeon runs like this really make me happy, and make me feel more connected with my free company, so it was an excellent way to close the evening.

Hardcore Mining

March 9, 2015 by Belghast

Quest for Airships

Since the detail was first teased during the Las Vegas Fan Festival, our guild has been focused on making sure we can get a Free Company airship. The biggest concern however is that when Yoshi-P calls something “prohibitively expensive” it gives us serious pause. This is the man that thought 6-30 million gil for housing was “reasonable”, so if something is prohibitively expensive… what in the world could that be? Over the weekend a Polygon article came out with some quotes from the man himself, and I talked a little bit about this yesterday. Unless you did not have time to read the article, let me focus in on the part I am actually interested in.

“Once you have the workshop, you decide on what you want to make,” Yoshida says. “For example, if you’re going to build an airship, you go part by part. You start with the engine. Your free company teammates gather the materials necessary to build the engine. The crafters within the free company form a party, and then it’s a group effort to build the engine.”

Yoshida says the free company crafting system will grow and expand throughout content patches for the expansion — what he is calling the “3.X series of updates.” To create their ship, free companies will have to combine different engines, bodies and other parts. The ships will have different stats depending on the combinations made, leading to unique ships for different groups depending on their focus.

“Having as many options as possible is a good thing,” he says with a smile.

So our biggest concern with this statement is the fact that he says that you will need a party of free company crafters to complete some of these actions. Now currently we have at least a “light” party worth of Omni crafters, meaning that they have every single profession to max level. But since he doesn’t specify my concern is that it might require a “Full” party of eight crafters to do some of the things related to crafting airship bits. If that is the case we are pretty screwed, because while some of our members have embraced the rabbit hole that is crafting, there are players like me that have completely avoided it. I guess for me my reasoning was that I wanted to make sure I got my combat classes up and geared before diving too far into the crafting system. That said I have WAR, PLD, DRG, BRD, and WHM all geared to ilvl 100 or better… so I guess I have done what I set out to do.

Hardcore Mining

So this weekend I embarked upon the mission to finish leveling mining. At the beginning of the weekend I was sitting around level 30, and last night before going to bed I had just hit 44. My hope is that maybe I can finish leveling to 50 tonight before raid time. Right now I am out in Coerthas doing mining leves, and the leveling is going fairly quickly. My goal is to finish leveling mining and then start in on another Disciple of the Land class probably logging next. My original plan was to level all of my harvesting classes to 50 before setting in and actually leveling crafting proper. I thought this might make life a lot easier to funnel resources into the “making things” professions. My goal is to be able to help the guild craft that airship, and while it is probably going to cots me several points of sanity… I care that much about the end result.

Mining is pretty much pure tedium, in that it involves a lot of running around and clicking things repeatedly. As such I opted to hang out downstairs on my laptop and catch up on various television options while I repeated the same process over and over. Yesterday was all about watching the various episodes of Star Wars Rebels that I had missed. I have to say that show is absolutely phenomenal, and if you are not watching it yet… I highly suggest you do so. I am pretty happy with Disney’s leadership so far of the Star Wars brand. That show is chock full of really interesting characters, and it gives this whole guerilla fighters against the empire feel which is excellent. The danger of their situation is constant, and they managed to create an extremely insidious villain in the form of “The Inquisitor”.

Quietly Amazing

This morning when I went to log in and take a screenshot of me in my awesome mining regalia, I was greeted by this screen. Yup it looks like Cactuar was in fact full at 6 in the morning, and I am thinking this is pure insanity. I know for some time Cactuar has been locked from the creation of new characters during prime time hours. However I wonder if we are starting to reach that state of permanent lock status? That is going to be horribly unfortunate for anyone wanting to join our Free Company and the great little community we have built there. My hope is this is some sort of fluke, and they were doing maintenance on part of the servers in our cluster. I know our Free Company and me specifically has been the cause of a bunch of recent transfer and new character creation activity on our server, and I don’t really see that as something that is going to change. I love our folks, and they have been so amazingly helpful to the new people starting.

When someone asks for a dungeon, it seems like people stumble over themselves ready to help them out. At one point earlier this weekend I was going to DPS one of these dungeons, until another member who was working on their first character said they could use it too. I bowed out of the run to let the folks able to get experience that really matters get in on the fun. That seems to be the Final Fantasy way, quietly and unassumingly… being awesome. I mean at this point Final Fantasy is the second most popular MMORPG of all time… and it just kind of happened without folks really realizing it. Having over four million active accounts is a pretty great feat in this world where supposedly Wildstar didn’t even sell a million boxes at launch. Sure the expansion was pushed back a little further than I would have liked it, but I love the fact that there is content planned to cover that gap. Now that I am embarking on the madness that is crafting, I am also admittedly looking forward to having more time to work up crafters before the expansion hits.

#FFXIV #Mining #Cactuar